Good, Bad & Ugly Reviews: The Loft

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 13% (Critics) / 48% (Audience)Directed By: Erik Van LooyWritten By: Bart De Pauw and Wesley StrickStarring: Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller, Matthias Schoenaerts and Eric StonestreetStudio: Open Road FilmsSynopsis: Five married guys conspire to secretly share a penthouse loft in the city–a place where they can carry out hidden affairs and indulge in their deepest fantasies. But the fantasy becomes a nightmare when they discover the dead body of an unknown woman in the loft, and they realize one of the group must be involved. – (Source)

The Good:
To this film’s credit it assembled a very fine cast made up of a lot of actors I like.

The Bad:
Too bad they were stuck in such a bad movie and misused from the opening credits to the end. The women in the cast were especially mistreated as none of them were more than character types instead of actual characters. The women in this movie served two roles: they were sexual objects or ball and chains.

The Ugly:
The “Big Twist” was bad enough but the “Even Bigger Twist” was just downright stupefying.

Final Verdict: A messy, soapy melodrama that comes across like the unwanted love child of a Brian DePalma 1980s thriller and a Shonda Rhimes prime time TV series. Never quite finds the right balance of thriller to soap while also not being nearly as smart as the filmmakers obviously thought it was. It also pretty much wastes a winning cast.